1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to maintenance in imaging devices, such as printers, and more particularly, to an inkjet printer maintenance system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Industrial printing technology employs thermal inkjet printers for a variety of commercial printing applications, such as mail addressing and printing, and packaging coding and marking applications (i.e., printing on a product, on a primary packaging and/or on a secondary packaging). Typically, the aforementioned commercial printing applications entail the use of thermal inkjet printers that include stationary printheads (i.e., printheads provided at fixed positions within the thermal inkjet printers). In such thermal inkjet printers, target printing media (such as mail, boxes, products and the like) are allowed to move past the stationary printheads.
It has been observed that the stationary printheads are required to undergo maintenance very often in order to perform effective printing operations. However, difficulties have been encountered while performing traditional maintenance operations (such as spitting, wiping, capping and the like) that are required to keep the stationary printheads clean and unclogged/unplugged. Specifically, space constraints within the thermal inkjet printers make it difficult to perform the traditional maintenance operations for cleaning the stationary printheads effectively. Therefore, cleaning of such printheads involves either wiping the printheads manually or disposing damaged (clogged/plugged) printheads after use.
It has also been observed that production lines for the thermal inkjet printers are allowed to stop periodically in order to enable an operator to perform ancillary operations such as, setting-up or modifying the production lines, fixing problems, maintaining machines, and the like. Such production breaks may range from a few minutes to several hours. In such a situation, the thermal inkjet printers may undergo a transition from an idle (power-off) state to a printing state very quickly and without maintenance. Further, it has been observed that the thermal inkjet printers are powered down when printing stops for an extended time period (i.e., open time). However, the thermal inkjet printers may be left open to the atmosphere. An exposure to the atmosphere may cause clogging/plugging of nozzles of the printheads that may result in printing of images of a poor quality. The clogging/plugging of the nozzles may aggravate when the production lines are running at low speeds and the thermal inkjet printers are set for low resolutions in order to save ink.
Till date, various maintenance systems/approaches have been devised for rectifying the problems associated with clogged/plugged nozzles. However, such systems/approaches still have remained ineffective in rectifying the problems associated with the clogged/plugged nozzles.
Accordingly, there persists a need for an effective and efficient maintenance system and method for inkjet printers that enable the inkjet printers to print effectively even after being left open for an extended time period.